Father and Son; Credit: Maxim Kantor

Maxim Kantor will be present in Luxembourg at the Simoncini Gallery from 7 September to 13 October 2018 with a new exhibition dedicated to "Faust"; the opening will take place on Friday 7 September at 18:00 in the presence of the artist who will return on Wednesday 10 October at 18:30 to host a meeting-presentation around his novel Feu rouge / Rotes Licht with a reading in German of extracts of the novel by Leila Schaus.

A Russian painter and writer, born in 1957 in Moscow, now a German citizen, Maxim Kantor is invited everywhere to present his paintings and artists' books that make the link between painted work and writing. As well as masterful canvases using dazzling palettes, there are also the inspired novels from this high-ranking artist. A great figure of the underground in the 1980s and discovered as a dissident painter a decade later, Maxim Kantor is a total artist whose deeply humanist art emphasises human suffering and the need for solidarity and of love to overcome it. But the work is as much a political manifesto as that of a rebellious man who says and paints the excesses and deviances of the world.

In 2006, Maxim Kantor, who represented Russia at the Venice Biennale in 1997, and is present in the biggest museums of Europe and the United States, is also a writer with a novel about Russia. Numerous others followed, including in 2009 "Against Foot", a real advocacy for civilisation and, in 2015, Red Light, a century of history of Russia spread over three generations. The novel was released recently in French has just been translated into German. "It is difficult to know what impresses most about Maxim Kantor: that a painter of international renown is also a novelist of rare power, in full possession of his literary talent, or that it serves to stir such a historical matter" wrote the journalist, columnist and writer Eric Naulleau.